Dare to doubt and keep going - Frances Yeoland

0:08It's like, where does anyone's art come from? But for me, as I said, it comes from an emotional place and it's usually with language. So I also write poetry and those sort of fragments of language become the basis for the piece. So I am very interested in the momentum of language and something that has meaning that you can take out of that context and put it in a new context and it takes on new meaning. So usually it starts with the language and there's a lot of feeling in that writing. And then I will make an artwork based on a line from one of those poems. And recently I've been exploring how you can create rhythm visually that parallels the rhythm of the language itself.

0:57Welcome to Daring Forever, a podcast about being human, wired for wonder, capable of courage, perpetually becoming. It's about the waves that look us under and the strange stubborn grace with which we surface. My name is Radim Malinic. I'm an author, creative and an eternally curious human being on a mission to speak to incredible people whom I call forever daring humans. Those in pursuit of an extraordinary life. Every week I share an interview that is packed with amazing stories, value, and I can only ask you, how will you dare forever? This podcast is inspired by my upcoming book titled Daring Forever, which is now available for pre-order out in October.

1:42My guest today used to keep her two lives completely separate. Commercial creative director by day, artist by night, never letting the two touch. Frances Jowlen is a Sydney-born, New York-based creative director and artist whose abstract paintings begin as poetry, fragments of language turned into colour and rhythm on the page. In this conversation, we talk about art galleries as home, the tension between making a living and making art, and why she resists the urge to retouch a brushstroke that stayed outside the lines. We get into living eulogies, sitting comfortably with ambiguity and why doubt never really has to leave the room.

2:20This is my conversation with Frances Joland.

2:25Hey Frances, welcome to Daring Forever. It's great to have you here. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. Thank you for having me. The work that you do, the way you do it, how you do it, and for the purpose that you do it, really fascinates me. And I use these interviews almost selfishly to find out more about people that I like their work and ask them questions I would like to ask them. So welcome to Daring Forever. If anyone heard of Frances Yoland, how would you introduce yourself? Well, I am a creative director. I'm based in New York. I've been doing it for about 15 and something years.

3:02But I'm also an artist. I have a studio in Brooklyn where I do a range of different work, but some works on paper. And I think to describe myself is, it's a complicated question. I think that as creatives, we do many different things. We have many different skills, whether it's writing or design or photography. For me, it's across all of those different things. And I think there's real joy in that sort of mixture of all the different skills. You said creative director first and artist second. So if you tell someone in Brooklyn that you're a creative director, they'll ask you, so what sort of work do you do?

3:43Yeah, they usually say, well, what do you creative direct? which I think is an interesting angle because creative director as a title applies to many different industries and it means something different. You could be a creative director of a fashion label. You could be a creative director of the ballet. But for me, it's working in branding, brand building, and brand storytelling. So that encompasses campaign work, design systems, and other kind of expressions or sort of brand challenges that we're trying to solve. Excellent. So how did you find yourself in a position of creative director in branding systems?

4:17What was the path to that position now? Yeah, it's a good question. It's a bit of a windy one, which I think a lot of people have a different way to getting there. But I studied a Bachelor of Design in Sydney, Australia, which is where I'm from. And I didn't really know that graphic design existed. When I did that course, I wished that I was doing fine art, but I had some grown-ups in my life that recommended I do design so that I could get paid for my work. And I actually loved it. I think it was such a great place for me to understand my own skills. And it was a mixture of language and delivering a message through visuals, which was a really exciting combination for me.

4:59You're one of those people who didn't know that graphic design existed when they started doing graphic design. I think that's the magical mix because everyone who didn't know graphic design existed, discovered graphic design, is still graphic designer today. And I knew a bunch of students who were graphic designers and they're like, none of them are graphic designers today. They work in insurance and music business and that kind of stuff. That's funny. It's one of those things. But when you said people told me I should do graphic design over fine arts so I get paid. I can understand that now from a neuroscientific perspective that people are looking out for our safety.

5:31It's not because they don't want to succeed. They're looking out for our safety. And that's the kind of way that we need to almost understand it. Because you say, oh, my parents didn't want me to do it. Maybe because of their perception. But actually, it's the fear of the unknown for them that they want to project onto us. What was your relationship with FINA at that point? Because it sounded like you wanted to do it, but graphic design was something that took charge. Yeah, I love that we're touching on this theme so early in the podcast because it's very prevalent in my work. this sort of tension between needing to exist under capitalism and making art.

6:04I think for me, art has always been a real solace. It's always been a place to go for me to be able to survive different things, survive understanding myself. And no matter where you are in the world, you can go to a museum or a gallery and you can find a kind of home there and connect with other people through art so it's always been that place for me and my parents were not particularly interested in visual art but I think being in Sydney I had access to different museums that I would go to as a teenager and that has been something that I've continued to do throughout my life in a pretty voracious way I would say.

6:42I think you may have said the most succinct way of describing an artist feel or artist life by saying art galleries were my home this is a place where you can always find your home i never thought of it that way but maybe i was hoping that sort of existing to someone and you just said that because you mentioned about tension when it comes to money and making careers when you said art is your solace and when you said art is a solace and art galleries are your home i was like oh you don't have to tell me that you're an artist because Because you just told me you're an artist before I necessarily tell you me you're an artist, if that still makes sense.

7:17Because it's so beautifully put together. I'm joining these dots together. Do you remember the feeling when art entered your life? And you're like, oh, this connects with me. Yeah, I think Australia is such a fascinating place. And there's a bunch of different amazing art being made there. But it is essentially quite a new country. I mean, not the indigenous cultures that have been there for many, many years. but it was colonized fairly recently. And I think it became at that point this sort of a Western outpost in Asia. And so its geographic position allows these amazing influences to come in.

7:55But there's also this very strong connection in terms of aesthetics and visuals to Europe and America. And I find that really fascinating. And I think I was trying to understand that as a teenager, and I still don't totally understand it. It's complex. But I think it was something that I had access to through an art class at school. You know, I was lucky enough to have an amazing art teacher that exposed me to lots of different artists, including Yayo Kusama, who just died, very sadly. So I think that was a lifeline for me at that point. I'm also a queer woman and I was understanding that in quite a conservative upbringing and trying to navigate that.

8:34And art became this place that told different stories for me and allowed me to access different ways of living and I think that was super powerful for me at that point in my life. You said art told stories to you how did you connect with it because storytelling is I think one of the hardest things to really crack to actually get it across in art itself because when you said and I've realized I'm not an artist when you said our galleries are my home or museums are my home I was like I like those places but they're not in my home I'm not an artist I'm a creative i'm a designer my home is in bookstores actually it's very much bookstores i'm an author i'm becoming more of an author than i'm becoming a creative and that's my home that's where i remember when i moved to england 26 years ago walked into a place called waterstones and i'm like oh my god tell me when you're closing because i'll be here for a while it just was a place which showed me the way of what i can become but i have as a creative as a designer as a cd myself i've been learning how to tell stories through visual storytelling for a very long time because it can feel quite confusing to really understand the formula of what you're trying to say what are the nuances of storytelling when it comes to art it's such to me like a place where I can only work on the feeling sometimes I find it hard to decipher the story but how was it for you that as you said as a queer woman obviously there was a different perspective to put it together Yeah, I don't have an answer for how to tell a good story.

10:03I think all art and even the commercial work that we do is just an attempt at cracking an understanding of things. And you can try to do it in many different ways. I think sometimes when you try to appeal to too many people and have too broad of a story, you connect with no one. So it's better to use a singular voice and a singular story to provide an example for people to connect to. So you can do it in lots of different ways and it can be a feeling or a rhythm. It can be music. It can be an energy. It doesn't have to be language, though I do love language. And I think that's what we're all trying to do is figure out a way to tell a story.

10:42And sometimes it's a corporate brand story and sometimes it's a personal story or sometimes it's both. And I think that is fun. It's interesting to me that you distinguish between art and books. Galleries and bookstores is different because I would think of that as books are art, both visual and linguistically. I distinguish between them for my feeling because I can go to a gallery and appreciate the art, but I can quite happily crack on and you go da-da-da-da-da. And just to me, it's not a place of ponder. It's not a destination. For me, it's an attempt, as you used the word, attempt for storytelling.

11:19for me it's an attempt to understand what it is but i get more feeling from the tactile world so of course i'm not discounting one or the other but for me like for example when you said galleries are my home it's like oh yeah my home is in bookstores like this is where i really can spend a lot of time and feel like the time slows down and you can just disappear from the world for a bit and i think everyone's good a little bit and everyone's good there's something that they connect with some people go to football some people go somewhere else but and what a gift that It is. This is offered to us as humans, these different experiences through art and books and bookstores and sport, which less for me, but I do understand the power of that for other people.

11:59I think we're lucky to have those different ways of finding connection and finding peace in the world, especially now. Absolutely. Let's go back to the teenager who's discovered graphic design and living in Sydney, as a double as in art. Where does graphic design take you next? well I went to London actually right after I graduated and I was working at a sports management agency doing graphic design for protein powders which if you know me that's quite different from my lifestyle now but I think it was an amazing time for me I was there for under a year it was very short but I had no money I worked in retail on the weekends and was earning barely anything And I think I had to fill my time.

12:44And that's when I started drawing. That's when I started doing collage. I also learned to cook during that time. I had to make my food stretch out over the week. And so I was learning about flavors and how to make things tasty. And as they say, necessity is the mother of all invention. But I do think that was a big turning point for me in terms of using art as something to do and to understand what I was going through at that moment. And after that, I moved back to Australia and was working in publishing. I worked for a beautiful independent publishing house called InDesign Media, not related to Adobe InDesign.

13:19But it was three different titles that were all about architecture and design in Asia Pacific. So we were dealing with these gorgeous images of beautiful houses in that area and beautiful furniture design. And it was a pretty rigorous training in graphic design, understanding how to use a grid and preparing things for print. And it was a really wonderful place for me to learn really technical skills, but also about editorial and understanding photo shoots and art direction and how to combine that with the actual design itself. It sounds like a fantastic learning of a creative director who works in brand storytelling.

13:57Wait a minute. So you were in London, doing protein powder packaging, making beans and toast, stretch fire. Lentils. And working in lentils. Now, of course, beans and toast is the classic joke, isn't it? How come London? All of a sudden, obviously, we're in Sydney now, we're in London and we're back in Australia. So what was the draw? How come? Was it spur of the moment? Was it connection? How did you get to London that way? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it seems pretty obvious for Australians. I think, as As I was saying before, the Australian perception is very much about the Western world.

14:29And there's always this drive to leave Australia and go and study your work in the UK or the US and then take that knowledge back to Australia. But in terms of my family upbringing, my mom was one of five children and they grew up in Glasgow and they all left Glasgow and moved to different parts of the world. my mum to Tasmania in Australia, which in hindsight was a crazy choice. And London, I have cousins in Prague. I have an uncle in Hong Kong. My aunt married an Italian and lives in Florence and I lived there for a year as well. So my family is very spread out. So this notion of moving overseas and trying something different felt very normal to me.

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16:03that's a fantastic story i like a bunch of scottish scottish kids just conquered the world and now they're everywhere. I love that. So when you said Australians go to the world, learn about getting knowledge and go back to Australia, so you knew how to design protein packaging, how to cook your lentils and how to work your retail. Because Australians aren't fit enough. That's incredible. So you're back there, you're working in publishing, you're getting this crazy good education of everything that, you know, how to, as you said, publishing. When you said getting things ready for print, exactly, we know exactly where we are.

16:35but how does it feel for you to find your own voice because as you said you were filling your time in london by doing drawing and discovering yourself you are still learning about yourself creatively and professionally how does the creative output as a someone who's becoming an artist how does that sort of piece your identity throughout all of this yeah i think i didn't know at the time and as i said before i think it's a lifelong process of understanding at that point I was just doing it on the side. It was really something that brought me joy. I would do it in my kitchen table, in my studio apartment or the share house that I was living in.

17:14And it became something that gave me purpose. I enjoyed the process of it, the kind of emotional output and the calming effect that it had on me. And I liked the way that people responded to it. And it connected me to other people. Everyone in my life had a different reaction to it and would buy works or I would share it with them. I didn't have a lot of money, so I would often give it as gifts, which became this beautiful exchange. And I think I wanted to see where I could push it, but it was a constant struggle with needing to own money and pay the rent and find space and time to make art. And this is not my unique story.

17:53I think a lot of people, especially in New York and London, where it's really tough financially, finding that balance is difficult. And I think what I did was created these two very distinct paths. It was like, I have my art and I have my commercial work. And I really wanted in my mind to separate them. But as I got more developed in both paths, I realized there's such a beautiful crossover with the way that I work as a creative director and as an artist and I just decided to embrace the two and it's funny that you should call out the typography on the publication or the promotional material for my art show because to me that's like an example of how it crosses over it's like oh I have the skills to be able to promote my art and communicate it in a clear way because those are things that I've learned and how my brain has been wired through commercial studio work so yeah now I've really embraced the kind of like meld in my brain of all the skills it's interesting because when you started saying like we've got all my art i got my commercial work my question was do they meet in the middle now i know they do and what i want to know is when you have a conversation with someone people like to pigeonhole people people still people outside the creative world or people who don't exactly know the details of not being an artist or commercial creative what it means they would think that you need to be one thing to put them to be understood even linkedin if you set up your linkedin wants you to be one thing like this is your job title what do you mean you've got two different jobs what do you mean you've got three different things or four what do you want to choose as the one and that linkedin is designing that way that you just like you've got one thing and that's designed almost like the social perception so when someone says so you're commercial creative are you also do art okay and who did your paintings who did your book cover how to do your posters oh you did it all yourself oh wow yeah it is all possible isn't it how would you describe it to people who are potentially quite sometimes baffled in being able to do more to be more than one person or one in one thing i think you just have to sit with the ambiguity and it's not really my problem i think if if they of course i care about branding i think about perception all the time but at some point it doesn't really matter i like to make things and I like to collaborate with people and how I spend my time is it's not really up to me to help break that down for people I think if there's a specific job that I'm going for a specific project that I know I have the right skills I will speak to those skills but in general I think it's exciting to confuse people and be like well why not absolutely love things just sit with the ambiguity who cares I've just told you enough but you can figure fill in the rest I mean I love it I think people are afraid of mystery and I like mystery and mystique not to say that I'm mysterious and I have mystique but I think it's this feeling of like why do we have to have everything answered all the time we don't really have to have it with a bow on it yeah that's your brilliant take and I think that ambiguity and the honorable ambiguity or whatever you feel like that's your own because I have spent a lot of time advising people how to introduce themselves on a podcast because I feel when you tell people what sort of problems you solve, you're quite likely to make a connection.

21:13You're quite likely to make a new commission. You're quite likely to get somewhere creatively, let's say as one of a creative consultant or advisor. And it's helped me quite a lot in my career by opening my mouth and saying, hey, I'm not really sure how to introduce myself, but I solve these problems. And it's semi-ambiguous because you can solve any problems if you put yourself into it. And I get a lot of people on this podcast who I can see exactly who they are. And they're sometimes my friends. They're like, oh yeah, I don't really know how to introduce myself. And I'm like, I can teach you how to do this.

21:44There's methods how to do, how to apply the thinking, how to apply the structure of the sentences. But if you go after a specific outcome of, let's say, making sure that you're understood, that's the method. In your case, you're like, who cares? I can tell you just enough and you can fill in the blanks, right? Yeah. And sometimes it's about an energy. There's different ways that you can describe people. You could talk about their achievements, the projects they've worked on, or you could talk about their values, what they care about and their process. It's funny, this might be a little bit macabre, but I was having a conversation with a friend recently about what you would say in someone's eulogy and how you would describe them.

22:27And he was like, I want people to talk about who I really am and my qualities. I think the eulogies obviously need to encompass different people's achievements and the things that they've done in their lives. But don't we all really care about the qualities of who we are as humans and the way we work and the way we make the people around us feel? I think that's so much more interesting to me than having a laundry list of here's what I've done and here's where I've been. maybe we should all work on our eulogies in advance and just pass it on and say by the way this is my values don't forget those right that is the most creative director thing you could say like okay i'm gonna brief the people that are doing my eulogies so that they're clear and they can deliver it in the way that i would like it did make me think of a book idea though for wouldn't it be fun to write a book of eulogies for the living so that your friends could actually read them talk about the people you love and who they are so that they hear it before they die it's really interesting the book that i'm releasing which is based basically the the podcast is inspired by the book and the book is called daring forever the podcast called daring forever and it's about pursuing the things who would otherwise regret never starting in life obviously the eulogies and book of eulogies be quite interesting thing to pursue not to regret never starting it but there was actually a chapter which was you by living eulogies because the book concludes with a chapter about gratitude about how i think we are fucking lucky to be even doing this this is incredible i can talk to you i can tell you how much i love your work i can celebrate what you do we can do this this is incredible right this is our reality we don't have to go and dig for potatoes or carry stones or whatever and there was a chapter i had in there called living eulogies i was literally thinking like how is it again from neuroscience perspective like the way we use our gratitude we are becoming something like it's not something that comes to us as a feeling is actually it's biological because the more you go gratitude for life the more you feel actually satisfied gratitude produces happiness in a way so i had a subsection about living eulogies but i couldn't fit it in a print book i had to cut it so when you talk about it i was like maybe i should put it out there as a blog posts or something because it's one of these things like for example we as you said we recorded in a week where yaya kosama died as well as dolly parton and when you think about the admiration so many people have for these artists they die and everyone goes oh my god i love them and you're like i've known you for 25 years i never knew you were dolly fan what is the right level of expressing ourselves like we should potentially not invent something just have a day of appreciation like every friday like who do you suggest like who do you celebrate what do you do because i think the gratitude for living people doing incredible work i think can always be bigger and i think we're more expressed in a better better form maybe i'm just totally losing the plot here but i'm like maybe we could get a section of the newspaper for living obituaries or something yeah or living yeah just like gratitude of the week or celebrating a human of the week or something like that because the eulogy is still quite macabre so keep breathing we love you we appreciate you this is hilarious and yeah it's interesting how those two things connected what i was i cut from the book just a few weeks ago and it's here but let's talk about your work let's talk about your artist so let's talk about your art and let's talk about the work you do there because there's a real progression in your style i think that is in every every artist life you mentioned when you lived in London there was a bit of a collage work that you did and I've kind of want to know how did you bring these pieces together and what was your obsession for art and I say obsession because you've started and you haven't stopped so to me it's an obsession where did it come from that influences from Sydney it was now taking around the world you making art throughout all of this so how do we trace it where does it come from yeah great question I think about that all the time and I think that there are things that are offered to us as humans or processes that help us move through life you know whether it's dancing or having a coffee in the morning or going for a walk or connecting with friends and I feel very lucky that art has been something that I've been able to pursue as a way of kind of pulling out different levels of grief and transition and different things that I've been through in my life.

26:58And the art itself is a bit of a dance for me. It is a kind of choreography of moving the lines around the page and it comes from a very intuitive place. So I try to approach it very differently than my commercial work in that I am not thinking about the final product. I really, that's where I unwire my brain or try to rewire my brain to not be thinking about what the outcome will look like. I try to tap into a more emotional sort of place and allow it to be expressed in that way. So it is very process driven for me. But of course, as a creative director, we like polish and we like nice things.

27:39So there is a refinement that I think that I've moved towards in my output in recent years, which has been exciting. Yeah, I want to talk about it. But when you said quite beautifully that it's a dance, it reminded me of a chapter from a different book. For a change, I'll talk about a different book on this podcast, not mine. And it's a chapter from, it's a section from The Courage to be Disliked, which says, the title of the section says, Live Like You're Dancing. Our life is just made of these little moments. Like when you're dancing, you can have your routine set up, but then you made your mistakes or you made it make a side step missteps it's a collection of small moments that all add up together and that's what it is and when you started saying when you were saying that your art is like a dance to you it made me really think of it like you know art as a dance that you put all of these elements together and they come together your work is obviously taking a particular sort of stylistic sort of feel look and feel at the moment but when i look at your earlier work there's a certain ways of discovering of where you want to be what you want to do what was the patience to discover your style what was the patience and process because you said you think about it every day you know you process how you and how you create this stuff but was there ever sort of creative intent going where am i where is it going am i finding the style or starting the voice i mean just that passion yeah patience and this content?

29:06B, never. I always know exactly what I'm doing and exactly what I'm trying to do. No, I think it's always a bit like, oh, is this good? Is this bad? And I look back at some of my old artwork and I'm like, oh, I don't know. I wouldn't have made that now. But you have to look at this art and accept it for what it is as a sort of stepping stone. Like you have to go through that and process it to be able to get where you are. And it's the same with design work. you have to trust the iterative process. You have to be able to sketch and figure it out. And I think a lot of people look at the blank page and they're like, okay, I have to nail it in the first try, which is just very unrealistic.

29:45And so you have to give yourself the grace as an artist to be able to work through that too. And of course, it's vulnerable looking back and being like, oh, I don't really like that style anymore. And when I go to Australia and friends' houses and things, I see it hanging on the wall and they love it and they're connected to it. But I've moved on from that era and that's a vulnerable thing too because you you're seeing this kind of like moment in your life memorial just on their wall i can absolutely understand what you're saying because i've done a few books and people like i love your first book i was like i would happily delete it now just like there's some good moments but like that thing has passed like it's gone what i want to know as someone who works very digitally i mean we do things with hands for for our branding clients we still use a lot of post-processing and retouching but in a physical world sometimes you can make a brushstroke only once how do you process that dissonance between the two worlds the digital and the physical where in the digital world you can make as many iterations as you want in a physical art aspect you can only make sometimes one decision how does that work against each other it's such a good question and like i feel like a lot of designers and creatives are listening to this it's like you see a mistake and you're like oh I just want to fix it but that's the impulse that I'm fighting in that moment I think I just posted a photo on my Instagram and there was like a bit of the paint went over the line on the edge and I was like I could retouch it but I really asked myself not to I was like this is what it means to be handmade and obviously I wish that I had done it neater or inside the lines or whatever but I think you have to it's a process of acceptance and being like okay that's what it means to make something and here it is earlier i like when you said i can retouch it i don't know exactly what you mean anyway the latest pieces of work that you've been doing for a while i'm fascinated to understand the stories so you said as a teenager loving art you could tell stories or you can see stories in this work i'm not going to ask you for inspiration but where do you go in the point of creation and understanding what you want to create and is there a certain plan because you quite beautifully say some people hope to get it right on the first take with a blank piece of paper let's turn into masterpiece press p for masterpiece job done never happens obviously so where does this work come from in a way like where do you find your way of you know exploring this particular visual language but colors, pieces, shapes, understanding, sizes?

32:21Is it ever pre-planned or does it just let it come together naturally? Yeah, it's a good question. It's like, where does anyone's art come from? But for me, as I said, it comes from an emotional place and it's usually with language. So I also write poetry and those sort of fragments of language become the basis for the piece.

32:46So something that has meaning that you can take out of that context and put it in a new context and it takes on new meaning so usually it starts with the language and there's a lot of feeling in that writing and then I will make an artwork based on a line from one of those poems and recently I've been exploring how you can create rhythm visually that parallels the rhythm of the language itself So obviously it's abstract art that I make and it's a lot about color, but you know, as creative directors and designers, we know that color is imbued with a lot of emotion. So the choices around the color equally is intuitive, but it's also about the places that I'm in.

33:28And so I have an album on my phone that is color stories. And I just take photos of different little like urban compositions and I pull the colors from that. But it's all a bit unknown. It's like when you start to mix the colors, I'm not an expert on color theory. And so the color often turns out to be something different. And again, got to go with it. It's not like you have an eyedropper and you can match it perfectly. Right. I've never met an expert on color theory who would be actually interesting. there's actually a fellow of australia and daniel jones from silver chair who was once described on one of his collaborators who said you cannot teach interesting he's interesting and you cannot teach that and i think sometimes knowing too much about what you want to do can stifle your progress because there's many amazing session musicians they can play whatever they can pay back or rachmaninov and jesse jay at the same take with different hands and they are not the best-selling artists they are just workhorses behind some big musicians and i think what you're describing is it's the feel it's the story and you just drop something in your answer just now which i was like oh wait a minute okay so that's what we're going to talk about next because you said i first write a poetry i'm like but there's no poetry on your instagram i can't i didn't know that's what you do so i really want to go deep i really want to deep on how you do this not just necessarily how you write poetry but you said i find a rhythm in the language and then build the visual representation so we're going to spend half an hour on this this is incredible i'm like so excited about this i just feel so honored that you're interested in my art i thought we were going to be talking about a lot of commercial projects so it's a real joy to be able to share this with you also can't believe you mentioned silver chair frog stomp was my first cd i got incredible i just got goosebumps you just mentioned frog stomp and i got goosebumps like i'm here and singing him tomorrow oh my god well we grew up in a good decade yeah exactly yeah so when words i was not expecting anything but like i'm surprised that the words came up as the sort of the nexus of what you're creating so i know you tell me you've got color stories on your phone but where do the words come from is a picked up language is it something that you try to project of i will just ask you the question where do the words come from where do words come from yeah i think for a long time I separated writing and visuals and as I was working on design projects and a lot of it advertising and campaign driven and about delivering this message I was afraid to try my hand at writing and then I just started like sneaking into layouts language and ideas for taglines or for different copy and it really opened up this whole world of bringing it all together so the writing and the visuals and being able to tie it together to tell this story was really fun and I think that has always been something I've loved I've been interested in language and studied Italian and I've studied Spanish and I just enjoy words they bring me so much joy and I think the rhythm of it and the layering and the fun that you can have with it and how you can corrupt language and create new meaning and evolve it into something new is so exciting and so So yeah, I started just writing poetry.

36:52I'm not, and I haven't studied literature and in lots of ways I feel self-conscious about the quality of the writing, but I think then I resist that again because I think that language has always been something that's been pushed and changed and subverted in these different ways. So I try to play with that and I find it fun and the humor in it and the meaning that you can build is really a playground i think in absolute way that's just the thing as a fellow visual creative who's now turned very much to introduce himself as an author first rather than designer or creative i couldn't understand in my late 20s mid 20s when there were designers who went into writing careers i'm like what are you doing i used to measure my happiness by hours of photoshop i was spending my hours in photoshop like i've just spent eight hours illustrating the Photoshop, right?

37:47This is brilliant. Like it was my purpose. It was my thorough happiness and measure of happiness. And I've spent most of my time now in word documents and working as a guest editor on other people's books and doing all sorts of things on that way. And as a consultant, but always retaining that visual aspect, but words are mostly now the first, what would you say? Like my first medium in a way, like the symphony of the black and white letters on white paper. And I never thought that would be possible. but what you're describing like it was similar to what you described like having a go at a few taglines i was like oh i can potentially sneak in here and then you try to do a little bit i've tried my hand in poetry too and it's just when you look back at it going oh it's just a bit rudimentary but at that moment i feel like a superhero because you're exercising something new your brain was discovering something new about what you can do and taking it somewhere you don't have to judge it in a way but you can let it you can let it judge but you can see other people's work anyone can judge anything you don't have to look too far for once yeah for one star review of some amazing pieces of work because like it's not for everyone i think that's when we understand and agree that they're like okay it's for some people in fact it's for very few people and that's when they really that's where really lands so when you make your poems let's call them poems how do you then transfer it into as you said there's the sort of flow of the language and the flow of lines that you that inspire you to create this visual representation of your work so can you explain it again it's what i'm working on at the moment and i don't know if i've cracked it but i think that it is a combination of forms organized in a sort of rhythm that reflects the energy as i experience it of the words themselves so let's say it's a sentence when i did recently was like under forever under restriction or I had another one that was empire will empire I liked that one and it was this feeling of we all exist within this system and the machine will keep churning and then I try to tap into that feeling and then whatever comes out onto the page is connected to that feeling that was a pretty bleak one but it is true that is the kind of ideas that i'm playing with in the work it's amazing i'm now looking for your pieces of work and now it all makes sense okay good and 11 weeks ago you posted on wanting many things and i replied love this but i was clearly talking about a visual piece now i know that this meant a little more but fascinating process i just love to know what all of this means because as i said 11 weeks ago i was like this piece is great and that piece is great and i just love that cut and paste nature like i feel like the the way you draw and the way like it still looks quite collaging quite put together and i think that's incredible work as let's say as a designer and brand storyteller when you think about it you just you're moving things in the right place and right shape that they make sense you create the things in between that you need but it's more than not rewarding to find the answer within what already exists because when we go through that first sort of egoistical phase of our creative life we're like i'm going to invent everything i'm going to change fonts i'm going to do this and then you realize no all you have to do is just make this just a bit better and make you more connect with more people and whatever and i think what you using as a sort of visual linguistic objects like words and then turn them into this representation i think it's fascinating because it almost seems as you the more i look into your work basically i can see now how you do this because before that it was just a collection of beautiful visuals and shapes and textures and now we're like oh so you like as you said you like ambiguity you like people to sit with ambiguity but now we're putting more color into what you do i'm enjoying it more so what's it like to describe this process to people because obviously it's very personal but it's connecting yeah it feels great I think I haven't had so much space to share my work I had one solo show in New York at a gallery called Duplex Art which the show was curated by a really talented curator called Sydney Fishman and she did an amazing job of kind of drawing this out of me in the same way that you did and helping me express my work in a more organized way and I think I was so afraid to do it and it felt so vulnerable like most art is but I realized that it gave other people permission to be vulnerable as well and to share whatever it was they were making so one of the things we did was a dinner in the space and there was a reading and we invited different writers and professional writers other artists some people that had never shared their work to also share and that was transformative for me and I think that it was really a wonderful thing to create space for other people to share their work and that's what you're doing here you are inviting people in to share their ideas and to connect with different people and I really believe that community is how we will save ourselves and I think it's so important to fight for it but takes a lot of work and time so thank you.